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Under The Wire

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Hi everybody, for a while we weren’t having fresh invitations to test new services. In the last days I got five invites for LLOOGG.

If you are asking yourself what the hell is that double lettered service I think that I couldn’t have found a better way to describe it than the way its authors did: your web2.0 tail -f access.log.

Nothing simpler than a page where you can find live who’s reading your pages, what pages and where did he come from. Looking at your visitors coming to your last post minutes after you wrote it could be a pretty thing.

Although the main aspect of lloogg is that allows you to see what’s going on live on your pages it provides you simple charts of records of past days visits. By sure it is not as detailed as Google Analytics, but do you really need all that data for a personal blog?

More useful the data about Top referrers (Come on, link us! :-D) Top search (Sometimes it could be funny) Top pages (Don’t you want to know what is your most read post?) and of course Browser war.

If you want an invite as usual, post a comment. And be quick since I have only 5 invites to share!

Friday, September 26, 2008

I think I gave a chance to every existing Windows podcast catcher without finding something that really worked as I desired. Here is my experience with the main programs and why does them suck:

iTunes for Windows is probably the best example of bloatware. It eats resources just to play some music. Since I don’t have any iThing I have no need to have it installed.

Juice was messing up with user rights making it unusable. Also the broken links at their official page made me feeling like if I was in front of the corpse of the project.

Doppler had some exception coming out at every start, and also other bugs. Not answering my question surely didn’t make me wait for a new release, neither to give help finding and fixing the problem.

After these (really bad) experience I decided to open NetBeans and write (in Java, so my software is also cross platform) one podcatcher form scratch. After all I’m a developer!

Maybe I may have to wait to have some spare time to design the coolest user interface in the world, but so far I’m needing a programs that works without hassles. I can think about making it eye-candy tomorrow, now I want to grab some podcast to make myRadio (Sounds like a good name, isn’t it?).

If you want to learn more, have a look at the code or just compile (Did I mentioned the program is open-source?) and run the pre-alpha version I’m developing go to the myRadio sourceforge page. So far it is working even if lacks some functions I’m going to add as soon as possible, and I think it is the most important thing right now.

Don’t forget to ask for features and signal bugs. I promise that as soon as I have some spare time to dedicate to the project I’m going to answer.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Are you thinking that I’m writing an article explaining how Steve Jobs in a dream revealed himself how to design the most famous tech gadget? Actually you are a little wrong, it wasn’t a dream nor was Steve Jobs the brilliant inventor that first thought about the device as we know it.

Surfing on the web I found this really interesting site where Kane Kramer explains what he designed (not in California) 20 years before Apple iPod. Am I the only one that is finding more that one or two similarity between this concept and the Apple product? I feel like if I am in front of a couple of brothers!

The Apple fan you have inside is saying that Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, that was really original. Sorry for that Mr. Kramer was presenting the music shop of the future in only few years after Apple’s foundation!

The only thing that Mr. Kramer was missing was the Internet. Without it such a business was simply unaffordable.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Although there is someoneclaiming to have switched yet I think that Chrome is not going to kill other browsers, simply because even if you can find tons of hype-generated articles you are not looking at a mass switching. Considering that blogsphere is writing about Chrome but just downloaded it to have a sample ride must made you think: so far we have still IE6 with a 25% share. Common (non-geek) users may find interesting the download link on Google’s homepage, actually my brother noticed it the first time he Googled something, but they are not going to download it.

Cutting off non-geeks that are not switching to Google I’m going to tell you why geeks aren’t switching although they have copy of Chrome in their systems and tired it for a while:

No extension yet, try to search for “Google Chrome AdBlock”, seems that in the last days this is the only question on the web. Seriously do you think that Google would be happy to give out a browser with the capability to hide ads and to kill their revenue?

I know you didn’t clicked on the link on the want in the previous point, but I also know you should have done unless you have carefully read the terms of use.

Chrome is cool but there is nothing that requires Chrome to work properly. Why change browser to fix something that is not broken?

It based on something that was designed with security in mind, and this is the result.

Ok it is fast, but my navigation style is “check feed reader”, “open interesting articles in a tab”, “read what I opened before”. I don’t think I could appreciate speed differences since tab loading happens in bacground.

Process isolation is a good idea, but looking at Vista reliability index Opera crashed four time since June. I’m not saying that it is a useless feature, but so far I can live without it.

Maybe some of you are thinking that a web browser isn’t really something new, and you are perfectly right unless the new browser adds some new capability. Google promises a browser for web-application, something that sounds to me like the Google OS that Google can’t develop. Does it seems a good idea? I don’t think so, why should I have (and maintain) both a regular OS and this web-app OS? Why should I give to Google more data than the personal information has yet?

Looking at Chrome features I’m not finding the big thing that such noise made me expect for:

Stability: one tab, one process, as in IE8.

Speed: it uses webkit, so at least I can be as fast with Konqueror or Safari (But is better if you don’t use something designed with security in mind). Maybe the new JavaScript Engine is good, but also other browser are enhancing their interpreters.

Search: Am I the only one that associates that with privacy danger?

User experience: I think to have yet seen what they’re promising.

Security: wow a blacklist system pushed by Google, I hope that Chinese government is not thinking to use it.

Will it last as a revolution or is Chrome going to be a failure?

[UPDATE 9-2-2008] To download Chrome just open the Google homepage and follow the link. Soon my review.